Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

During the summer of 1893, John Philip Sousa and his band were engaged to perform several daily concerts at Manhattan Beach for a 10 week period. Manhattan Beach March was written directly after that summer concert
series and was an immediate hit.

I was a student at Kingsborough Community College. When I attended,the campus consisted of barracks left over from a WWII training facility. The old wooden buildings wouldn't have been worthy of being outhouses for this grande dame that stood on the sight earlier.

While hotel's receding into the mists of history, and the boardwalk no longer extends that far east, a small, crescent-shaped portion of Oriental Beach still remains. What makes it a bit unusual is that it is located on the campus of Kingsborough Community College and students use it as a lounge and outdoor lunch area. During the summer, outsiders can get special permits allowing them to use the beach, accessing it via a walkway that keeps them away from campus buildings.

And yes, that's Dead Horse Island in the background, though its proper name was actually Barren Island. Landfill has since connected it to the mainland.

What a beautiful building! I'm often surprised to see just how short-lived some of these magnificent buildings were. A mere 36 years is all this gorgeous hotel existed. I guess that's the price of progress.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo archive featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1960s. (Available as fine-art prints from the Shorpy Archive.) The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.